Did Jesus Celebrate Hanukkah? John 10 Puts Him at the Feast

Jesus was in the Temple for Hanukkah. John records it in two verses: “And it was at Jerusalem the feast of the dedication, and it was winter. And Jesus walked in the temple in Solomon’s porch” (John 10:22–23). The feast of the dedication is Hanukkah. John says that Jesus was there. He does not say how Jesus kept it.

John adds three words: “it was winter”. Hanukkah usually comes in December, when the days are shortest, and it remembers a Temple that had stood defiled until faithful Jews cleansed it and lit its lamps again. They “lighted up the lamps that were upon the candlestick, and they gave light in the temple” (1 Maccabees 4:50, Douay-Rheims). John gives us a scene that no other Gospel has: our Lord walking in that Temple during that feast. His word for it, enkainia, “renewal”, comes nowhere else in the New Testament. And in that winter porch the people around him ask, “If thou be the Christ, tell us plainly” (John 10:24).

What was the feast of the dedication?

It began with grief. The Seleucid king Antiochus IV Epiphanes ruled Judea, and in the hundred and forty-fifth year, as 1 Maccabees counts the years, he “set up the abominable idol of desolation upon the altar of God” (1 Maccabees 1:57). The Jews of Judea rose against him, led by Judas the Maccabee and his brothers. When their enemies were beaten, they went up Mount Sion and “saw the sanctuary desolate, and the altar profaned, and the gates burnt, and shrubs growing up in the courts as in a forest …” (1 Maccabees 4:38). They tore their clothes, put ashes on their heads and fell on their faces.

Then they went to work. They chose priests faithful to the law of God, carried away the defiled stones and built a new altar of whole stones. They brought in the lampstand, the altar of incense and the table, and lit the lamps. “And they arose before the morning on the five and twentieth day of the ninth month (which is the month of Casleu) in the hundred and forty-eighth year,” and offered sacrifice on the new altar (1 Maccabees 4:52). That was 164 BC. The people sang with harps and cymbals, “and there was exceeding great joy among the people” (4:58). Judas, his brothers and all Israel decreed that the day should be kept “from year to year for eight days, from the five and twentieth day of the month of Casleu, with joy and gladness” (4:59).

Casleu is Kislev, the Hebrew month that usually falls across November and December. The second book of Maccabees remembers the same eight days and says they were kept “after the manner of the feast of the tabernacles”, because the fighters had spent that autumn feast hiding “in the mountains, and in dens like wild beasts” (2 Maccabees 10:6). So they carried “boughs, and green branches, and palms” for the God “that had given them good success in cleansing his place” (10:7). The feast’s Hebrew name, Hanukkah, means “dedication”. It is the word Nehemiah uses when Jerusalem kept “the dedication of the wall” (Nehemiah 12:27).

Is Hanukkah in the Bible?

The feast is named once in the New Testament, at John 10:22. Its founding is told in 1 and 2 Maccabees, and those books are in some Bibles and not in others. They are not part of the Hebrew Bible. In Jewish teaching Hanukkah is “a late addition to the Jewish liturgical calendar”, a feast that “is not biblically ordained”, in the words of My Jewish Learning, a Jewish teaching site.

Here Christians part ways, and each church has its own words for it. Catholics count “1 and 2 Maccabees” among the 46 books of the Old Testament (Catechism, paragraph 120), and so a Catholic Bible holds 73 books. Orthodox Christians receive them too: they “are accepted by Orthodox Christianity as canonical scripture”, in the words of the Orthodox Church in America, which adds that they “are found only in the Septuagint version of the Old Testament, but not in the Hebrew texts of the rabbis.” Anglicans read the First and Second Book of Maccabees among the books that “the Church doth read for example of life and instruction of manners; but yet doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine” (Articles of Religion, Article VI). Reformed Christians, with the Westminster Confession, hold that “the books commonly called Apocrypha” are “no part of the canon of the Scripture”. Whatever our Bible holds, the story of the rededication is there to read, and John’s Gospel, which every church receives, puts Jesus at its feast.

Where does the story of the oil come from?

The story of the oil, one small jar that burned for eight days, is not in Maccabees. It comes from the Talmud, quoting an older teaching. The Babylonian Talmud, the great book of rabbinic teaching, stops to ask, “What is Hanukkah, and why are lights kindled on Hanukkah?” It answers with what “the Sages taught in Megillat Ta’anit”: “On the twenty-fifth of Kislev, the days of Hanukkah are eight.” Then it tells why: when the Hasmonean house overcame the Greeks, “they searched and found only one cruse of oil that was placed with the seal of the High Priest”, enough for one day. “A miracle occurred and they lit the candelabrum from it eight days. The next year the Sages instituted those days and made them holidays with recitation of hallel and special thanksgiving in prayer and blessings” (Shabbat 21b).

So Jewish tradition remembers the eight days in two ways. The first celebration “was patterned on Sukkot”, the feast of Tabernacles, while “much later rabbinic tradition ascribes the length of the festival to a miraculous small amount of oil that burned for eight days,” as the same site explains. The Jewish historian Josephus, writing around AD 93, already knew the feast by its other name: “from that time to this we celebrate this festival, and call it Lights.” He guessed the name came “because this liberty beyond our hopes appeared to us”.

How do Jewish families keep Hanukkah today?

Much of Hanukkah happens at home. Each night the family lights the hanukkiah, or menorah, “an eight-branched candelabrum to which one candle is added on each night of the holiday until it is ablaze with light on the eighth night”. With the lights comes a blessing to God, “who made us holy through your commandments and commanded us to kindle the Hanukkah lights”. A second blessing thanks him for the wonders he did for their ancestors at this season, and on the first night a third thanks him for giving them life and bringing them to this season.

The Talmud gives the lamp its place: “at the entrance to one’s house on the outside, so that all can see it”, or in a window over the street. It also records an old debate about the order of the lights. The school of Shammai began with eight and took one away each night; the school of Hillel began with one and added one, and a later rabbi explained Hillel’s view this way: “One elevates to a higher level in matters of sanctity and one does not downgrade” (Shabbat 21b). Families today add a light each night, as Hillel taught. In memory of the oil they eat food fried in oil, potato latkes and the jelly doughnuts called sufganiyot, and at community gatherings people sing Hanukkah songs and play dreidel. It is a small feast in the Jewish year, and one of the most loved.

Did Jesus light a Hanukkah menorah?

The Gospel does not say. John records that Jesus was in the Temple at the feast. He says nothing about lamps, prayers or meals. The earliest writings we have that describe Hanukkah lamps outside the Temple come from after his time.

The custom of the lights may still be as old as his day, even though no writing from that time describes it. The Talmud gives its rules as older teachings, opening them with “The Sages taught in a baraita”, and the debate over the order of the lights belongs to the schools of Shammai and Hillel. By Jewish tradition, Hillel “died in Jerusalem in the first years of the Common Era”.

What the Gospels do show is a man who kept the feasts of his people. His parents “went to Jerusalem every year at the feast of the passover” (Luke 2:41). He went up to the feast of tabernacles and “went up into the temple, and taught” (John 7:14), and at his last Passover, when “he sat down, and the twelve apostles with him” (Luke 22:14), he told them, “With desire I have desired to eat this passover with you before I suffer” (Luke 22:15). His saying “I am the light of the world” (John 8:12) belongs to that autumn visit: John places it in the Temple soon after the last day of Tabernacles (John 7:37; 8:20). When winter came, he was in Jerusalem, walking in his Father’s house at the feast of its dedication.

What did Jesus say at the feast?

The people came round him in Solomon’s porch: “How long dost thou make us to doubt? If thou be the Christ, tell us plainly” (John 10:24). He pointed to his works, and then he spoke of his sheep: “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me” (10:27). Then, “I and my Father are one” (10:30).

John does not soften what came next. “Then the Jews took up stones again to stone him” (10:31), and they charged him with blasphemy. John also shows that the people around him were divided. Just before the feast he writes, “There was a division therefore again among the Jews for these sayings” (10:19): some said, “He hath a devil”, and others answered, “These are not the words of him that hath a devil” (10:20–21). And when Jesus left the city after the feast, “many believed on him there” (10:42). The anger in this scene belongs to the men who stood there that day.

Jesus answered them from Scripture, “Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods?” (10:34), and then called himself the one “whom the Father hath sanctified, and sent into the world” (10:36). Some readers think John chose this word because of the feast. The Bible translation scholars Barclay Newman and Eugene Nida wrote in 1980 that “it may well be that this verb was used specifically because of the setting of the Festival of Dedication”. As they read it, the feast remembers a Temple made holy again, and Jesus speaks of himself as the one God made holy and sent. The book of Maccabees tells the rededication in the same terms: Judas and his men “sanctified the temple, and the courts” (1 Maccabees 4:48). Then Jesus “escaped out of their hand” and went away across the Jordan (10:39–40).

This December the Hanukkah lights will burn in many windows, one more each night, as the days grow short. When we see them, we can remember that our Lord once walked in the Temple at this feast, in winter, and that the words he spoke there are spoken to us now. He still knows his own, and he still keeps them: “And I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand” (John 10:28).

Related reading

• Is December in the Bible?
• When was Jesus born?
• Why is Christmas on December 25?
• Why is Jesus called the Light of the World?
• Judaism and Christianity: shared Scripture, different answers about Jesus